


No Le Saques

by VeloxVoid



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Childhood Memories, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, Found Family, Gen, Hallucinations, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Repressed Memories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:42:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27661528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VeloxVoid/pseuds/VeloxVoid
Summary: Sombra has buried the scars of her past down deep, yet when she is assigned a mission to Dorado, she is reminded too much of the terrors of her childhood. The memories hit her thick and fast, and it takes Symmetra to bring her back.
Relationships: Sombra | Olivia Colomar/Satya "Symmetra" Vaswani
Kudos: 14





	No Le Saques

**Author's Note:**

> This piece was going to be written for a Sombra-centric zine, but it very unfortunately fell through. As such, I'm posting the work here instead~
> 
> I really hope you enjoy — if you'd like to catch up with more stuff I'm writing, I'm [@VeloxVoid](https://twitter.com/VeloxVoid) on Twitter!

Sombra’s heart still raced. The battle was over. Sounds of victory rang in her ears: calls from her teammates, the relieved sobs of the spared villagers, congratulations from her irritating buzzing earpiece.

They all felt empty. Hollow. Once the adrenaline had begun to leave her body, her blood cooling as she sat down upon a low brick wall mystically unscathed from the skirmish, Sombra felt weak. Tired. _Vacant_.

The destruction of Dorado reminded her too much of when her hometown had been seized — of when she was a mere child, hearing the sudden tumultuous explosions from what was now known as the _Omnic Crisis_. Back then, however, Sombra’s parents had simply screamed out: _¡Infierno!_

Even the memory drew quivers to her skin — made her eyes widen and her throat tighten as the fear came flooding back to her.

She was grown now. She worked for Talon, as one of the best hackers to walk the planet. And yet still, on occasion, her heart rate would spike as she heard the shots firing from her own gun. As she sat upon a wall of Dorado now, the flickering bulbs all around her mottling the indigo sky with their feeble yellow light, she couldn’t keep the sounds of destruction from echoing in her ears.

Bullets ricocheted through her eardrums, seeming to bounce off of her closed eyelids in sharp, stabbing pains. She buried her face in her hands, trying desperately to shut out the noise, but images continued to rise to her mind. Images of collapsed buildings, smoking from within as ash and dust caught the breeze; images of robotic silhouettes stamped in black before the rising fires; images of blood lining the streets in thick, hot streaks of scarlet.

Was she Sombra, in that moment? Or was she Olivia Colomar?

She had almost forgotten that name. She pulled her hands from her face suddenly and opened her eyes. The light threatened to blind her despite being so feeble and dim, but it illuminated a figure before her. They were short, and young: a child, with clothes hanging from their skinny body almost like rags. Dark, curly hair hung limp down to their waist, almost obscuring their eyes that glowed a fierce magenta. What was most striking, however, was the device in their hands; it was small, electronic, and battered, with exposed wires hanging from its back where its outer shell had been destroyed.

The child was Olivia. On the evening of the _Infierno_ — the _Omnic Crisis_ — that had left her parents trapped eternally beneath the piles of rubble she’d scarcely dodged, Olivia had wandered aimlessly through the destruction for hours. She had staggered through the city on shaking legs until eventually something had stopped her; she had looked into a shop window — one cracked and partially shattered — and caught a glimpse of herself. The image reflected back at her, cradling the electronic so dearly to her tiny body with frightened, dejected eyes, was the same as the one Sombra looked into now, appeared before her in Dorado as some sort of ghostly apparition.

Olivia had been empty back then. With her hometown in ruins, the only people around were those like her. Hysterical children wandered through the streets on bare, dusty feet, crying and wailing. Stray dogs trailed after them with slobbering maws, as insidious as vultures circling carrion. Some adults crossed her path, each of them left without a home. Those that didn’t look exhausted and glass-eyed looked wicked, with malicious smiles slashed into their faces as they raided the homes of the dead.

Despite her desolation, Olivia knew even then to hide away from such people. It was a habit that had stuck with her; even today in the Dorado fight, Sombra had known to disappear at the sight of such malice. Today, she was able to melt into thin air with her Stealth — as a homeless youth, however, she had not had such a luxury.

Sometimes, though, one could hide no longer. When she had been forced out of the shadows to face people, young Olivia Colomar had learnt to manipulate: to create technological distractions in order to steal from beneath peoples’ noses, and to enter electronically-locked buildings to loot what was inside.

Then, _Los Muertos_ had become involved.

Once, Sombra had thought of her time spent with _Los Muertos_ as good. They had saved her — plucked her from the streets and given her not only food and shelter, but a new family, too. Looking back on it, however, she supposed those times were almost frightening.

She had been only a _child_ when they’d recruited her. Starving and desperate, one night she had put her talents to use. With no other option, she had approached an ATM, miraculously left functioning despite most of the bank attached to it being blown into oblivion. It was glitchy, and the lights behind the screen would cut out at random times, but the device in Olivia’s hands — a prototype of the cybernetics she would eventually fuse with — allowed her to infiltrate it. The ATM, after a few painstaking seconds of whirring, had spat out hundreds of _pesos_ , and had left Olivia scrabbling on the floor trying to pick it all up.

“Hey,” a gruff voice had said from behind her, cutting through the sounds of night.

Olivia had turned, terror turning her blood to ice, and had been prepared to run. Each muscle in her legs had twitched as desperately as a bunny’s in the jaws of a beast, prepared for death, but the next words that had met her ears had stopped her in her tracks.

“Pretty impressive.”

Being a part of _Los Muertos_ had felt exhilarating at first. Their goals of rebuilding Mexico — of taking back what was rightfully theirs and putting the rich in their place — had been a dream come true for such an excitable young girl. Yet the more Sombra thought of it — the more she imagined teenaged Olivia being at the forefront of such a task — the more she thought it worrisome. She had lost her childhood.

It all became too much in the end. Sombra remembered one day in the shabby _Los Muertos_ base she’d once called her home, when she had felt the same. Her life had become action-packed; her talents were put to use each day, and she witnessed corporations fall until eventually the government lay within the gang’s grasps. One night, before their plan had come to fruition, Olivia had found her cybernetics prototype again in her shabby cardboard box of belongings.

It was the same as it had been on the day of the _Infierno_. Slightly charred, and melted, but still functioning despite having been cast aside for her newer devices. She remembered making it — spilling her passion of electronics to her parents, who had, elatedly, helped her to construct something of her own. Olivia had turned the scuffed little box around, and had seen words etched into it, made with a cheap craft knife once she’d proudly finished constructing her little contraption:

_Pertenece a Olivia Colomar_

_Property of Olivia Colomar_

Looking at the half-broken contraption, her eyes had grown hot. The sounds of the rest of the gang could be heard from outside of her room, guffawing and hooting and celebrating their plan with the aid of the alcohol Olivia knew she was too young to drink. They were her family now, but she still felt so cripplingly alone; they would never be her true family — not really. They did not have the soothing words of her father, nor the gentle healing touch of her mother. They fought for what was right, but they would never love her — not how her parents had.

Olivia had curled up against the cold brick wall of her makeshift _Muertos_ bedroom, had let the hot tears streak down her face, and had sobbed. At the time, she had felt so helpless and pathetic: she was on the path to becoming the world’s greatest hacker, and she was bawling like a baby in her bedroom, clutching a childhood toy as if for dear life. She was crying over her lost parents, and her hometown — things that she could never get back.

Now, though, she realised that was normal. Of course a young girl would cry about such things! She even cried about them now, at the ripe old age of 30, allowing the same hot tears to roll down her cheeks and small, stifled sobs to echo off of her palms that were pressed so desperately into her face.

What she wouldn’t do, to have her childhood back; to have her hometown back; to have her _parents_ back—

“Sombra?”

A voice cut through her thoughts as sharp and quick as a bullet, and as she looked up once more, the image of the tiny Olivia Colomar dissipated at once. She was nothing more than a ghost now — a memory: wisps upon the wind like the dust of her hometown’s remains.

Sombra pulled herself back to reality and wiped her tears away to find somebody approaching: Symmetra. The woman’s mechanical arm had taken a hit — it smouldered in places, the wiring on the inside visible — but her face looked more concerned at Sombra.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, crouching to be at eye-level with the woman on the wall.

“Hm? Me?” Sombra asked. _No le saques_ , she told herself. She had to be strong — not plagued by things that happened decades ago. _Don’t be a coward._ “I’m doing fine—!”

“You are fooling no one, Sombra. Your eyeshadow is ruined.”

Sombra’s puffy eyes widened; she knew that her makeup had a tendency to leave harsh black and purple streaks down her cheeks when she cried, but had failed to realise that that might be the case now. “ _Mierda…_ ” she whispered to herself. “You got me.”

“You’re in your home country,” said Symmetra, “and it is being destroyed. That must be hard to witness.” She sounded almost analytical, but behind her golden-brown eyes danced a flame: compassion. She offered Sombra her right hand — the one that was not charred and smoking — and Sombra took it.

It was warm, and even a little sweaty. It took Sombra straight back to a moment in her childhood, taking the hand of the _Muertos_ member for the first time which was so uncomfortably clammy, until she felt herself being pulled back to her feet. Then, only Symmetra stood before her, still holding her hand, regarding her almost worriedly.

“We are here for you, when you feel this way,” she told Sombra. “We are your allies, you know.”

And Sombra knew that if Symmetra was just a little more warm, she would have used the word _friends_ instead. It made her smile, the action pulling at the tight, tear-streaked skin around her eyes. “ _Gracias, amiga,_ ” she said in return.

“Am I your _amiga?_ ” Symmetra’s eyes looked resigned, but beneath them was something almost content.

“Sure you are.” Before she could control herself — perhaps she was overwhelmed by the return of her childhood memories, frightened of being abandoned and alone again — she pulled Symmetra into a hug. She rested her chin upon the younger woman’s shoulder, and squeezed her eyes shut tight. “You’re right, it’s not easy seeing your hometown destroyed.”

To her surprise, Symmetra wrapped her arms around Sombra too, her hold a little limp. “It would be nice to see mine again one day,” she replied, in a voice so distant and far-away it took Sombra aback. It didn’t last, though. Soon enough, Symmetra pulled away and smoothed out her clothes, giving a little clear of her throat. “Anyway. We must report back.”

Sombra smiled. Her childhood had been hard — had been complicated, and difficult, and full of horrors no child should ever see — but she was not alone. Sometimes it seemed everybody around her was scarred in one way or another — had such horrors lining their pasts. She could cry about her lost childhood all she wanted; she would always want her parents back, and her hometown salvaged, and her country repaired, and that was normal. That was something everybody could relate to, deep inside.

For the first time in a long, long while, Olivia Colomar’s heart felt warm, and she began to walk side-by-side with Satya Vaswani. “Reporting back. Sure thing, _amiga._ ”

“Please refrain from calling me that.”

“Whatever you say, _amiga._ ”


End file.
